Large scale vacuum cleaners are known for a variety of applications, such as cleaning debris from the side of roads.
One such device is known as a “Truck Loader” and is manufactured by Giant-Vac of Georgia, USA. The “Truck Loader” is described at www.giant-vac.com and consists of a diesel or gas engine driving a four blade impellor. Leaves and other debris are sucked through an intake by the impellor and directed through an outlet to a truck or trailer.
The Giant-Vac device does not separate the debris from the air flow but merely uses the air flow to transport the debris. Other devices operate in the same way as the Giant-Vac device but add various forms of separators to remove the debris from the air flow. An example of such a device is found in U.S. Pat. No. 4,885,817, assigned to Howa Machinery Ltd. The patent describes a device that uses a blower to generate a current of air to collect rubbish which is deposited in a rubbish hopper. The device includes a cylindrical air-dust separation chamber that centrifugally separates the dust from the air stream. The cylindrical chamber is generally referred to in the art as a cyclone, or cyclone separator.
To improve separation of rubbish and dust from the air stream it is known to use a pair of cyclone separators. The first cyclone separator extracts rubbish and debris from the air stream but does not extract light particles such as dust. The second cyclone separator extracts the dust, thus expelling clean air to the environment.
Notwithstanding the available technology the inventor has found that the existing systems can be made to operate more effectively.